You realize the idea of JSON resume isn't "Write your CV in json and send that to your employer"... right?
It's actually quite sound: JSON Resume wants to standardize CV fields to improve compatibility between tools, ease conversion, ease theming and such.
It's a joke because it sounds good on paper but the execution is awful. I tried it out and the resulting CVs are look completely unprofessional, except they took three times as much effort.
This was my experience with JSON Resumes as well. I tried it out and eventually went back to MS Word.
I got all my data in there, although I found the schema to be very limiting. Then I went through 50-70 themes and none of them actually looked good when exported as a PDF or something you can email to someone else. Note to theme creators: 30px padding everywhere does not look good and makes things harder to read.
I could have customized a theme to fit what I wanted, but the schema was garbage. At that point, I might as well toss the schema and generator and implement my own resume template using something like Underscore, but it was a lot simpler to use Word.
Yeah I still think its a good idea, its nice to have all that information stored somewhere. If its in json then I can use it in a program or if I want to do it manually then I can read the json file directly. Definitely better then the scribbles in my notebook.
I don't really understand what part of it constitutes a "joke".
I was on about a specific resume that featured on HN about a year back (give or take). I wasn't aware of jsonresume.org when I made my comment. Sorry for the confusion.
Recruiters, not developers, generally read resumes. They are not used to reading JSON and it is hard for them.